Ben Epps' milestone turns 100

Broad Street is a dirt road. Clarke Central High School won't be built for decades. Where the baseball diamond is now, a grassy slope runs toward Brooklyn Creek.

A short, stoic teenager pushes a homemade wooden contraption to the top of the hill. It's something the crowd gathered around him only has seen in magazines or newsreels: an airplane.

The pilot climbs in, starts the tiny motorcycle engine and begins rolling down the hill. He picks up speed and, briefly, his plane's bicycle wheels lift off the ground.

Four years after the Wright Brothers, Ben Epps is airborne.

Harris Lowery can picture the moment better than anyone. He's built two replicas of Epps' 1907 monoplane, and though he doesn't dare try to fly the unstable craft, he often imagines what it was like.

"There's nothing like wheeling along the grass and looking over your shoulder and seeing a bunch of people standing behind you," Lowery said. "It puts a lump in your stomach. I can't imagine what it's like to build a plane and learn to fly it at the same time, and to be 18 years old. It's pretty death-defying."

One of Lowery's replicas is kept in the Museum of Aviation at Robins Air Force Base. The other, which he just recently finished, doesn't have a home yet, but Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport is a possibility. They're fitting tributes to the first man in Georgia to fly, but some think he deserves more.

The 100th anniversary of Epps' first flight will be a point of civic pride for Athens and an opportunity for the aviation community to polish the image of an often-overlooked but fascinating figure in early flight. He'll be honored at an air show and open house Saturday at Athens-Ben Epps Airport, and again that night at a banquet to raise money for a statue of Epps in downtown Athens.

"This is an educational thing we're doing to let people know the legacy he left behind," said Pat Cardin, an amateur pilot who's organizing the banquet.

Epps opened a mechanic's and electrician's shop on East Washington Street - where the bar 8e's is now - in 1907, shortly after dropping out of Georgia Tech. Admirers describe him as a tinkerer, a guy who liked to take things apart and put them back together again. He also was fiercely independent and insisted on doing everything himself.

As every schoolchild knows, Orville and Wilbur Wright first flew at Kitty Hawk, N.C., in 1903, and the nation was fascinated with the rapid advancement in the field, in both the United States and Europe. Films, books, newspapers and magazines were filled with drawings and photographs of aviation pioneers and their latest exploits. Epps decided if they could do it, he could do it, too.

"He was a go-getter," said David Hill, a distant relative of the Epps family and an amateur pilot in Atlanta. "He had gumption. He went out and did stuff."

That's in contrast to the Wright brothers, who spent years drawing, building and testing various designs before actually flying one. Using photos of European planes as models, Epps collected some scrap wood from a local sawmill and fashioned a frame for a one-wing plane. He used cotton fabric for the wings and rudder, bicycle wheels for the tail and a motorcycle engine to power a propeller from an exhaust fan. Then he just took it out to a field and started it up. It worked - sort of.

"1907, I don't even know if it got off the ground," his son, Pat Epps, 73, said. "We'll assume it did."

Epps' first plane was crude, but like the Europeans', resembled a modern plane far more than the Wright Brothers'. His plane took off and landed on wheels - making it able to refuel anywhere - rather than run on rails, and the pilot sat upright in a seat rather than lying on the wing.

He wrecked several planes, and each time built new ones. They got better and better, until in 1924 he built one that still serves as a template for modern ultralight planes. He sold that plane for $1,000 to a New York man, who promptly crashed it.

Epps' luck finally caught up with him in 1934, when he was seriously injured in a crash. Three years later, another crash killed him. He left behind nine children, eight of whom became pilots themselves.

Epps is left out of the history books partly because he flew solely for the love of flying, partly because he lacked the money to mass-produce his planes and partly because he didn't make any major innovations.

"He didn't really seek publicity," Hill said. "He was a loner. He worked on his own. He did it on his own. He wasn't really doing original research, either.

"He was an early tinkerer more than a scientist with a technological breakthrough."

If nothing else, Epps' legacy is making Athens the cradle of Georgia aviation. He inspired a number of well-known aviators, including the recently deceased Howard "Mac" McWhorter and William Lloyd Florence, both decorated military pilots.

McWhorter, Epps, his eldest son Ben Jr. and three other Athenians are among the 74 members of the Georgia Aviation Hall of Fame. Athens native Robert Armstrong is a champion stunt pilot. And the local airport named for Epps does a brisk business in charter flights and lessons, and is a base for hundreds of amateur and professional pilots.

"I think his involvement, his insistent perseverance in flying, helped it," Pat Epps said of his father. "I think the university, people constantly coming to go to school, helped spread the gospel of flying, too."

In Athens and across the state, aviation now is big business. Hartsfield-Jackson is the nation's busiest airport, and companies like Lockheed and Delta employ thousands of Georgians. Aviation companies that contracted with the military were among the first businesses to employ women and pay them an equal wage.

"Technological development brought economic development, and also social change," said Mark Tuttle, producer of a documentary on the history of Southern flight.

By introducing flight to the state, Epps is the man who started it all.

"It's a phenomenal legacy he's built for aviation in Georgia," Cardin said. "If not for him, it might have happened eventually, but he opened the door."

Key dates

1888: Ben Epps is born in Oconee County.

1907: Epps pilots the first flight in Georgia history in a plane he built himself.

Ben Epps, Georgia's pioneer pilot, a bust? He is now thanks to Athens sculptor.

SCHEDULE OF EVENTS HONORING BEN EPPS

Several events are scheduled this week to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the first flight in Georgia.

Saturday from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m., Athens-Ben Epps Airport will host an open house in honor of Epps, the state's first pilot, featuring aerobatics from Epps' son, Pat, and others, food, tours and the dedication of a bust of Epps.

Saturday at 6 p.m., a banquet at the Georgia Center for Continuing Education will commemorate Epps, hand out awards in his name and raise money for a statue in downtown Athens. Tickets are $100 and tax-deductible. For more information, call Pat Cardin at (706) 543-0763.

ACC-TV, channel 7 on Charter cable, is showing Bill Evelyn's 2001 documentary, "Ben T. Epps: The Legacy of Georgia's First Aviator," as part of its programming rotation.

Georgia Public Television will broadcast a new documentary, "The South Takes Flight: One Hundred Years of Aviation in Georgia," Oct. 22 at 10 p.m. The film traces the history of flight in Georgia from Epps to modern times, and places Georgia's contributions into a global context.